The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The Episcopal church camp at Avon Park was desegregated in June 1955

Thirteen months after Brown v. Board of Education, and while Florida’s public schools were doing nothing at all, the Episcopal Diocese of South Florida opened its summer camp outside Avon Park to Black and white children together, and kept it open when two of its own parishes objected.

What happened

April 1955. The diocese’s annual convention, meeting at Fort Lauderdale, passed a resolution opening Camp Wingmann, near Avon Park, “to both White and Negro races.” The Very Rev. Osborne R. Littleford, dean of St. Luke’s Cathedral in Miami, said the vote was “almost unanimous in favor of integration, ‘with only 8 or 10 people out of several hundred voting disfavor.’”[mt-1955-06-04][mt-1955-06-25]

June 1955. The Miami Times announced it a week before the camp opened: “The Episcopal Church in the Diocese of South Florida struck a blow at segregation last week when it announced that Camp Wingman, their summer camp near Avon Park, will be opened to Negroes as well as Whites. The camp opens next Friday and the first session is for high school students. Representatives from St. Agnes, Christ Church, and the Church of the Incarnation here in Miami are expected to attend.”[mt-1955-06-04]

Dean Littleford gave three reasons, and it is worth having all three on the record because only the first is the one usually quoted:

  1. Church policy. “The action … conforms with established church policy and is not being pioneered in Florida,” and “clergymen feel the church has a moral obligation to live by its desegregation stand.”
  2. Money. “A new camp would have cost around $40,000 … And we had to build it or integrate.”
  3. Proportion. “Only 10 per cent of the communicants in the diocese are Negroes and he expects a proportionate number of Negro children to attend the camp.”[mt-1955-06-04]

The protest, and the refusal. Two Tampa parishes — St. Andrew’s and St. John’s — protested, and one of them asked for a special convention to rescind the decision. The vestry of St. Andrew’s demanded that the camp be restricted to white attendees only, temporarily closed, or that the desegregation efforts cease, arguing that “the question of segregation [was] a social and political issue rather than a diocesan issue.” On 25 June the Miami Times ran it on the front page: “BISHOP STANDS GROUND; CHURCH CAMP WILL STAY INTEGRATED.”

Bishop Henry I. Louttit, head of all South Florida churches, said, “as far as I know there will be no action to segregate the camp.” … “I can’t call a convention every time a minority wants one,” the bishop said. “The last convention passed this resolution so overwhelmingly that I see no reason to call 130 congregations back to reconsider their action.” He said “we are accepting applications as we receive them regardless of color in accordance with the action of the convention.”[mt-1955-06-25]

Bishop Louttit also noted that the diocese had a long-standing history of including Black members in its conventions, clergy conferences, the Woman’s Auxiliary, and other groups.

The paper also records that before the camp opened, Louttit had the clergy tell every parent sending a child that it would be desegregated.[mt-1955-06-25] Nobody was to be able to say they had not been warned.

The first attendees. The exact names of the children who attended the first integrated sessions in June 1955 remain unknown; the Miami Times noted only that representatives from St. Agnes, Christ Church, and the Church of the Incarnation in Miami were expected to attend. However, civil rights activist Samuel Augustus Jennings recorded that he and a friend from Clermont attended the camp the following summer in 1956, noting they were the “only two Black boys in the entire camp” at that time.[jennings-2020]

Why this belongs in Avon Park’s history

Because of where it happened. Camp Wingmann sits on Trout Lake on the edge of Avon Park. In September 1951 the Avon Park city council had voted to declare void every ballot cast in the town’s Black voting place and to seat the men who had lost; the Florida Supreme Court stopped it that November. Less than four years later, a mile or two out of the same town, Black and white children were being enrolled in the same camp because a church convention had voted for it and a bishop would not back down.

Both things are Avon Park’s history. The camp was not a town institution and the decision was not made locally — it was made at Fort Lauderdale and defended from Orlando — but it was carried out here, and the children came here.

And it did not come out of nowhere. While the children’s summer camp sessions had historically been restricted strictly to white youth prior to the 1955 convention vote, the diocese had been bringing Black clergy to Avon Park for years before it brought Black children. The campaign to integrate the church camps was spearheaded in 1954 by the Rev. John Edwin Culmer of Miami. Culmer, a Bahamian-born priest who served as the first Black Archdeacon of the Diocese of South Florida, was an outspoken advocate for civil rights. His outspoken opposition to segregation in the church resulted in the outlawing of segregated banquets and the successful push for the integration of church camps.[archives-culmer]

Bishop Louttit’s response to the Tampa vestry confirmed that diocesan-level events were already integrated:

  • October 1949 — the diocesan clergy conference met at Camp Wingmann on the 18th to the 20th, and Fr. Elisha S. Clark, priest of St. Matthew’s Delray Beach, St. Philip’s Pompano and St. Mary’s Deerfield — three Black missions — attended and “reports that the conference was very inspiring.”[mt-1949-10-29] The camp was in year-round use for diocesan business as well as for children, and Black clergy of the diocese were meeting at Avon Park in 1949.
  • October 1952 — “Tuesday morning Father Clark, along with Father John Reece and others, drove to Avon Park to attend the clergy conference and retreat at Camp Wingman.”[mt-1952-10-11]

Nor was the Episcopal church the only one meeting across the color line at Avon Park. In February 1953 the Southeastern Regional Meeting of the Congregational-Christian Churches met at Avon Park, with delegates from Talladega College, the historically Black college in Alabama, attending; the Miami Times put it on its front page and said the meeting “indicates a significant advance in human relations.”[mt-1953-03-07]

None of this appears in any local history of Avon Park. It survives instead in the Black press — specifically The Miami Times, which mentions Avon Park thirteen times between 1949 and 1956, in newspapers filed under other towns’ names rather than the white local papers of Highlands County.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. The Miami Times (Miami, Fla.), Episcopal Summer Camp [to be opened to Negroes], The Miami Times, 4 June 1955, page 13 (1955)
  2. The Miami Times (Miami, Fla.), Bishop Stands Ground; Church Camp Will Stay Integrated, The Miami Times, 25 June 1955, page 1 (1955)
  3. The Miami Times (Miami, Fla.), Delray Beach News, by Frances Bain Adderley, The Miami Times, 29 October 1949, page 15 (1949)
  4. The Miami Times (Miami, Fla.), Church news column, The Miami Times, 11 October 1952, page 13 (1952)
  5. The Miami Times (Miami, Fla.), Southeastern Regional Meeting of the Congregational-Christian Churches at Avon Park, The Miami Times, 7 March 1953, page 1 (1953)
  6. Samuel Augustus Jennings, FROM DA BACK OF DA BUS . WHERE THE ORANGE BLOSSOMS GROW, Reflections from Central Florida, Fall 2020 (2020)
  7. The Archives of the Episcopal Church, The Reverend John Edwin Culmer, 1891-1963 · Church Awakens (2026)

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